Sea Lord

enjoy herself, or perhaps she was just glad that I was sailing out of her life again. She’d brought a picnic of cake and sandwiches and made tea in Barratry’s galley. Charlie filled the hot tub on the bows and let the children splash around as we talked about old times. We laughed at the memories of Charlie’s poaching expeditions, and Yvonne shyly recalled how he’d once stolen my father’s Bentley and parked it outside the house of a notorious local whore. It was a happy afternoon, and I was glad, for I didn’t like to think of Charlie and Yvonne embittered.

They all went ashore at tea-time. I held Charlie back before he joined Yvonne and the children in his dinghy. “I want to say thank you, Charlie.”

“For nothing.” He was embarrassed. He glanced round to make sure Yvonne was well out of earshot. “I’ll see you in the Caribbean, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe I’ll bring Joanna. Unless you tell me there’s a surplus of crumpet over there?”

I smiled. “There always is, Charlie.”

He punched me on the arm. “See you, Johnny.”

“Be good, Charlie.”

He paused, then roughly embraced me. “You’re a lucky bugger,” he said, then he climbed over the guardrails and dropped into his dinghy’s stern. His outboard coughed into life as I untied the painter. Charlie waved, then steered away. The tide was on the turn, about to ebb, and I was alone again.

I was provisioned, I had filled in the Customs’ form, I was ready. I had one port to visit, then I would be free. There didn’t seem any purpose to be served by waiting so I pulled my new rigid tender aboard and stowed it aft of the liferaft on the coachroof. I opened the motor’s seacock, gave the stern-gland a turn of grease, then started the engine. The wind was coming dead from the harbour entrance, so I’d need to motor out to sea. Once at sea there would be no hurry, ever again, so I’d let the sails do the work. I cast off the lines which held me to Barratry, pulled in the fenders, then turned Sunflower’s bows to the wind and let the motor idle as I hoisted the big main. I let her drift on the slack water as I hoisted the foresails. The red ensign, battered from a hundred foreign gales, lifted at the stern. I turned to stare ashore, but Charlie’s dinghy was already lost among a host of other little craft. There was no one to bid me farewell.

I put the throttle forward.

I’d been home just over a month. My mother had died, my sister had spurned me, two men had tried to kill me, and now I was leaving. I should have felt some regret, but I didn’t. Neither regret, nor sadness, just the excitement of another voyage beginning, and when I felt that small familiar excitement I knew that the self-pitying disease that had made me want to stay ashore was gone. I was cured. My spirits rose as the boat gathered speed. The engine thudded happily. The sails, sheeted in tight, flapped desultorily and the compass shivered on its lubber line.

I turned due south at the fairway and let the wind belly the sails. I throttled back, allowing the wind to share the engine’s load. There was a shudder in the sea as we crossed the bar, then the bows dipped to the first real wave and a shred of white foam spattered back on to Sunflower’s gunwales. The tide was beginning to help me so I leaned down and cut the motor, silencing my world to everything except the noises of water and sails and ropes. Sunflower heeled to the wind, and the tiller stiffened in my hand.

It was a good wind, a skirt-lifting force five or six; just enough to break some water across our bows. I could feel the raw and lovely power in Sunflower’s big sails now. She was hissing in the water, smashing the waves, creaming them back, driving through a five-foot swell like a thoroughbred. The wind was more westerly than south, a perfect wind to cross the Channel. I had to keep an appointment in Jersey before I left home waters, then I would be gone to the wild seas. Just one more duty, then I’d be running alone and the bastards couldn’t touch me ever again because, once more, I would be alone and lost and free.

They called it a Convent Hospital, but in truth it was just a big Victorian house that stood on the heights near La Corbiere Point. The sisters and their patients enjoyed six acres of land that fell steeply towards the sea. I left Sunflower in the St Helier Marina and rented a bike that I pedalled along the island’s southern shore.

“She’ll be glad to see you, so she will.” Sister Felicity limped beside me down a path which twisted between laurels and rose bushes. I had tried to persuade her not to walk with me, for she looked desperately tired and old, but she had insisted on coming. “I’m not so old that I can’t lean on an old friend’s arm,” she told me. “And when I heard you were coming, Johnny, I promised myself I’d have a day out of bed. And how are you?”

“I still seem to be getting into trouble, Nanny. I don’t try, but it comes all the same.”

“It’s your Irish blood, Johnny. But I have faith in you, so I do. One day you’ll take responsibility for someone, and that’s the day you’ll settle down.” Sister Felicity was pure Irish. She had once been our family’s nanny at Stowey, but after we had all left the nursery she had gone to take the veil. Her fondness for and familiarity with Georgina had made this pleasant house an obvious refuge for my younger sister. “Mind you,” Sister Felicity went on, “it’s past time you did settle down. You can’t gallivant for ever.”

“Why ever not?”

She paused to take breath. I was worried for her health, but she was more worried about me. “You should have children, Johnny. What will happen to the Earldom if you don’t make an heir?”

“The Earldom’s gone, Nanny,” I said bleakly. “It disappeared with the house. We’re nothing now. We’re just a tired old family that has squabbled its life away. In a few years we’ll all be gone and no one will even remember us.”

“You’re so full of it, your eyes are brown!” She smiled at her own coarseness. As a child, as now as a man, I loved this woman far more than my real mother. Felicity had no guile, just a heart of pure affection. Now, unwell, she held my arm tightly as we began to walk again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t cross to England for your mother’s funeral,” she told me, “it wasn’t one of my well days.”

I wondered if she ever had well days any more. “You should rest, Nanny.”

“Ah, the Lord will give me rest in due time. But I wept for your mother, poor thing.”

“I didn’t,” I confessed brutally. “I haven’t even requested a Mass for her.”

“You should, Johnny. She was never good to you, but she gave you life for all that.”

“And she accused me of stealing her painting.”

“Who cares about a painting?” She stopped where the steps turned towards the sea and we could see a small sun terrace where three patients and a nun sat on wrought-iron chairs. “And there the dear thing is!” Felicity said. “You go on alone, Johnny, I’m not sure I can manage the last steps.”

The ‘dear thing’ was the Lady Georgina Rossendale, but I did not go straight down to her, preferring to stay a few more seconds with Sister Felicity. “Is everything all right here, Nanny?”

“With God’s blessing it will be. The diocese is always talking about selling the house, and I could see why they’d want to because it must be worth a wee fortune, but so far, thank God, they haven’t done it. But if they do, Johnny, we’ll just pick up our skirts and find somewhere else. Don’t you worry yourself.”

“And Georgina?”

“On her good days she misses Stowey.” Felicity made a small gesture of resignation. “Not that she has many good days, but when she does I sometimes think her understanding is just beneath the surface, like a bubble that only needs a little nudge if it’s going to burst, but then she falls away again. Poor thing. But she’s never any trouble, never at all. She’ll be glad to see you.”

I went down to the terrace, but it was not one of Georgina’s good days. At first I was not even sure that she recognised me. She was placid, smiling softly, and gentle. I told her about Sunflower, and perhaps she understood some of what I said, for she pointed out to sea where a slew of yachts were catching the tide before turning north towards Guernsey. Lunch was brought to the terrace on trays and I gently fed Georgina and mopped up her spills.

I left her in mid-afternoon. I climbed the steps, and only then did I learn that Georgina had remembered me, for, just before I would have disappeared behind the screen of bushes, she called my name. “Johnny? Johnny?”

I went back to her. “My love?”

She was crying. She was crying very softly, but the tears were flowing in copious and silent misery. She reached desperately for my hand. “I want to go home.”